Daniel W. Drezner takes to the op-ed page of The Washington Post to address the problem of “manels”—panels with predominantly male participants. Drezner is not an engineer—he’s a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University—but his points are certainly valid for panel discussions at engineering industry events.
Drezner notes that a decade ago, he organized a conference at the Fletcher School. “Many of the participants were people from my own professional network,” he writes. “It was not a conscious choice on my part, but the panels had a decent fraction of women participating in them.”
He adds that after the conference, a female student thanked him for the gender distribution. “She explained that she had attended too many conferences like these with only men on the dais,” he writes. “Just seeing women up there, she noted, made it more conceivable that, one day, she would have a speaking role at one of these events.”
Drezner writes that although “…this kind of demonstration effect had never occurred to me… the benefits of ending manels are pretty clear-cut…particularly in professions like the academy where there is no shortage of expert women who are qualified to participate.”
Perhaps this is where Drezner’s experience as a panel organizer would differ from someone organizing a panel discussion at an engineering event. Women are notoriously underrepresented in STEM education, at least in the United States, which would lead to a dearth of women in STEM professions and, perhaps, their participation in industry panels.
Nevertheless, recent engineering events I’ve attended, such as NIWeek last month, have had a good balance of genders among panelists and keynote presentations. Because of Drezner’s column, I’ll be especially sensitive to this issue at next week’s International Microwave Symposium. But NIWeek had a special forum on women’s leadership in the industry, and IMS next week has a similar event.
As a response to “manels,” Drezner refers to “’The Pledge,’ which states, ‘At a public conference I won’t serve on a panel of two people or more unless there is at least one woman on the panel, not including the Chair.’”
The difficulty with this, he says, is that panels are organized in advance, and participants may not know until the day of the event who the other panelists are. That’s fine, but it might seem reasonable to ask panel organizers to adhere to “The Pledge” before agreeing to participate.
